I’ve been reading a lot of “Year of” books lately, and they seem to fall into two categories: the ones I read expecting to really learn something and apply it to my life (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle) and the ones that are fun to read, but nothing I’d ever attempt (Julie and Julia). I picked up The Year of Living Biblically by A. J. Jacobs thinking it would be solidly in the second category, but was surprised how much it blurred the line between the two.
I was eager to read this one because I enjoyed his last book, The Know-It-All, so much. In it, he spent a year reading the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica, in his “humble quest to become the smartest person in the world.” I come from a family of trivia lovers, so that one might as well have been called Buy This for Laura (or Her Brother.) He has done a lot of other experiments in the name of writing, including getting a group of people in India to check his e-mail, pay his bills, and shop for toys for his son, which turned into the Esquire article My Outsourced Life.
The Year of Living Biblically is pretty much just what it sounds like — he spends a year trying to live as the Bible says, as literally as possible. There are the Ten Commandments, of course, but there’s a lot in there that has been mostly forgotten about or is ignored because it doesn’t align with modern thinking. That doesn’t deter him. He wears white garments (Ecclesiastes 9:8), doesn’t wear mixed fibers (Leviticus 19:19), stones adulterers (Leviticus 20:27 — his loophole is that the Bible doesn’t specify the size of the stones, so he pebbles an adulterer more than “stoning” him), and so on.
It’s very, very funny, especially the parts where his plans start to affect his wife. The Bible says that a man should not sit or lie where an “unclean” (i.e. menstruating) woman has sat/lain. A. J. realizes there’s probably not a safe seat in all of Manhattan, including subway seats and restaurants, so he starts toting around a HandiSeat — one of those canes that unfolds into a chair. One afternoon he comes home and starts to sit down in his easy chair, but:
“I wouldn’t do that,” says Julie.
“Why?”
“It’s unclean. I sat on it.” She doesn’t even look up from her TiVo’d episode of Lost.
OK. Fine. Point taken. She still doesn’t appreciate these impurity laws. I move to another chair, a black plastic one.
“Sat in that one, too,” says Julie. “And the ones in the kitchen. And the couch in the office.”
In preparation for my homecoming, she sat in every chair in the apartment…
A good portion of the book is spent finding ways to achieve the more, er, unusual Biblical laws, and another good chunk spent visiting congregations of other religious traditions. He hangs out with the Amish, visits Jerry Falwell’s church, goes to Jerusalem, and makes a trip to the Creation Museum. The balance is spent reflecting on his own life and how the experiment is going to change him as a person. He finds how much being thankful improves his outlook. When he (and by extension anyone) starts consciously being thankful for “the old Italian lady who sold the hummus to me at Zingone’s deli” or getting a seat at a restaurant quickly, he generally starts to feel more at peace with the world. “The prayers are helpful. They remind me that the food didn’t spontaneously generate in my fridge. They make me feel more connected, more grateful, more grounded, more aware of my place in this complicated hummus cycle.” He’s also a lifetime New Yorker and places a lot of worth in his sense of individuality, but starts to learn how much more focused he is when he is following guidelines on what to eat and what to wear. He starts (and keeps) praying, even when he’s not sure he believes in God, he finds that it makes him feel better to think that someone is paying attention.
The Year of Living Biblically didn’t make me go out and join a church or anything, but it did make me start thinking more seriously about religion than I thought it would. It also made me laugh. A lot. I’ll be looking forward to his next project.
And, at the risk of sounding crazy — if you read it, read the index. The kind of guy who reads the encyclopedia writes a good index.
